A common practice for restaurants and other food service establishments that serve slush, “smoothies”, or frozen cocktail drinks from a dispensing freezer, is to combine different flavors from several machines to create new drinks. This requires having more than one machine, or having machines with two or more dispensing heads, with the machine user (server) then alternately dispensing from the different heads to provide the desired combination of flavors.
An effort to address this problem is represented in U.S. Pat. No. 3,330,129 issued Jul. 11, 1967. This patent discloses dispensing a frozen confection into a user's cup, with flavor selection from one or the other of two side-by-side freezer cylinders. This patent discloses one valve for the left side cylinder, and another for the right side cylinder, and a third in the middle for simultaneously dispensing from both cylinders using a dual dispensing valve. While this approach might work well for soft serve product, there is a tendency for freezes or slushes or similar icy confections to clog in the longer delivery passageways between the two freezer cylinders and the dual dispensing middle valve.
Because of the practical requirement in some cases to provide some separation distance between the cylinders (in order to provide adequate room for refrigeration circuitry, sealing surfaces, etc.), the distance between each cylinder agitator and the common central port is such that there is a volume of frozen product that is beyond the reach of the cylinder agitator. The nature of many slush-based products is such that when they are allowed to sit without agitation, the liquid separates from the ice crystals, and the ice crystal portion can become densely packed and may form a clog, due to its weight and/or the mechanical packing action of a stirrer or agitator operating nearby in a frozen confection product supply freezer cylinder. We have found that this tendency must be successfully addressed in order for the central dual dispensing valve port to operate effectively.
So there is a need to address these problems, and the present invention does so for improving performance, versatility and reliability of simultaneous dispensing to a user's cup, of frozen beverages from two sources in a frozen-confection freezer system. To do so, one embodiment of the invention incorporates a mechanism in at least one delivery passageway to the dual dispensing valve, to inhibit clogging and break up clogs that might form and which might otherwise impair the flow of freezes, slushes, or similar icy confections.